>>1921122First thing is the use of transparency. You should not use transparency for shading. If you want your image to preserve different shades then every shade should be it's own shape and solid color: The same way you separate skin and cloth.
Using the only shaded image in the thread as an example. (
>>1914259) The shaded parts are their own solid color. Also, the shades follow the cloth ALL the way to the edge. No transparencys would be used for this. I barley made any marks on the body of the image, but like on the right arm how the darkest part hovers away from the edge, and on the right thigh how the shade ends early. The use of transparency also causes you a lot of issues. The yellow circle shows areas where your shade goes off the hair itself, or overlaps another shade to look funny (left armpit). Don't try to mimic every shade with a transparent overlay, and instead use just 2 solid shades of your main color.
Second issue it don't go overboard with detail. The main point of doing this is to remove detail and make things clean (hand trying to separate fingers). This image would look good with 2 shades for her shirt, but it has at least 10.
now here's some smaller things;
try to keep hair smooth with few nodes. The green shapes show the areas that looked off with examples.
for the cord I made a line with the pen tool and made the line colored instead of filling the shape. This isn't how long lines are meant to be done in vectors but it's a good cheat.
lastly skin color will almost always look really bad when taken right from the image. your skin color is a de-saturated yellow, and the square over it is a more-saturated red.
Short version; if you don't use transparency and don't go overboard with shades your images will start to look really good.
